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They're not posting meaningless, scale-less graphs showing sub-percent increases in compile times of various linux kernels... they're actually providing value for once. Phoronix is the OSNews of the new millenium.

They're not providing any value, they're summarizing a release announcement -- and the only things they left out are three bullet points that are just version number bumps for major apps/libraries in base.

Firewire was dead from the beginning. Apple held onto the Firewire trademark and there was a per device charge of twenty five cents (!394 cards, cameras, cable boxes, PC's or motherboards etc.). USB was inferior in many ways but was royalty free, almost as fast and available on every motherboard. After USB 2.0 came out, it was over for 1394.

I just hope Thunderbolt doesn't make the same mistake as it is a good replacement for 1394 and has plenty of bandwidth, even for video cards.

The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

Darwin is not a BSD kernel, so the kernel changes will never show up, no probably about it.

The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

The best way to think about it is that Darwin is "the kinda sorta fifth BSD", separate from {Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}BSD, but willing to pick stuff up from the *BSDs, just as the *BSDs are willing to pick up stuff from other *BSDs to various degrees.

I had a look through this timeline [levenez.com] tracing from the origin at NeXTSTEP 0.8, and now my brain is slightly melted O_o... but I managed to find all of the inheritance from other systems (excluding integrations between derivatives of itself like Darwin, OS X Server, OS X and iOS etcetera):

That's what i thought, but i don't know much about the early OS X before 10.4... did it have everything you define as inherited from rhapsody in 10.3? if so perhaps i should ask the author to add a link between the two offending nodes.

fs is a script that runs find with a long list of file extensions because I'd rather not type the long list of file extensions in a find command every time I want to find source files. I can operate find, I just prefer to write a shell script to do it for me rather than doing it manually over and over again.

Yeah i was a bit confused at the temporary switch in 2006 - 2007 in the timeline that suggested Darwin was the main development branch... i always viewed Darwin as the excerpt that Apple occasionally kept up to date.

Some bits of the FreeBSD kernel make it into the BSD server in the XNU kernel. One of the big ones is the MAC framework (SEBSD), which is shared between FreeBSD and XNU and supports pluggable access control policies. This is used to implement the code signing logic on Juniper routers and the application sandboxing on iOS and OS X. There are some pretty big differences to the VM subsystems on both (they're both derived from Mach 2.5, but they've diverged hugely since then).

Why does FreeBSD continue to develop two different versions rather than concentrate on making on superior product? They are years behind *nix and a decade behind Microsoft when it comes to drivers, wireless support and printer support. It just defies logic that they spread their all ready meager resources between to products rather than concentrate on making on superior product.

heh, well the userland part of FreeBSD has more desktop installs than Linux distros. and likely most slashdotters have devices in their home and workplace running either Free, Net or Open BSD and not even know it.

I run a FreeBSD server and still have an old OpenBSD soekris router in service, but I would not have said that there are more FreeBSD userland installs than Linux. What are you considering FreeBSD userland--OSX?

OS X's kernel is a BSD+Mach+various Apple stuff hybrid, many of its loadable kernel modules are BSD-derived, and the Unix part of its userland is a BSD+GNU+various Apple stuff+various other stuff hybrid; that doesn't mean that OS X is the same thing as FreeBSD, even if most of the BSD stuff is FreeBSD-derived.

I'm saying that you're right when you say "OS X has a BSD+Mach kernel" and you're wrong when you say "They're the same thing!" if by "they" you mean OS X and FreeBSD (i.e., people trying to use OS X as evidence of large market share for FreeBSD are wrong; it's evidence for large market share for BSD UNIX in general, but not any of {Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}BSD in particular).

to be honest, i never quite understood all that BSD/Mach stuff. what exactly is a kernel vs a linux or operating system? how can something be both bsd and mach, but not unix? all I know is there's a command prompt and it's not dos, so... case in point.

to be honest, i never quite understood all that BSD/Mach stuff. what exactly is a kernel vs a linux or operating system?

In most operating systems, there's a component that runs in a more privileged processor mode; that code is "the kernel" [wikipedia.org] plus, if the kernel supports them, any loadable kernel modules [wikipedia.org] that have been loaded.

"Linux" is sometimes used to refer to the Linux kernel, which is used as the kernel in various "Linux distributions", and it's sometimes used to refer to a distribution as a whole.

An operating system generally includes components other than the kernel; some people consider the kernel (and perhaps the loa

And a lot more with the coming PS4, which has moved to BSD derivative IIRC.

For the kernel at least - the devkits may have a full BSD install for debugging and development, but the "userland" of the PS4 probably won't - being it's completely self contained and exists within Sony's APIs.

Other things using a BSD kernel would be the PS3, Vita and PSP. It's easy to tell because a lot of BSD code is still running the regular BSD license (3 clause - GPL incompatible) and not the modified-BSD license (2-clause, GP

heh, well the userland part of FreeBSD has more desktop installs than Linux distros.

Or, at least, part of the userland part of FreeBSD, combined with part of the userland part of NetBSD, combined with a bunch of vendor-written code, has more desktop installs that Linux distros (most of those "installs" being what was shipped with the machine; BTW, the auto-correct feature of the latest non-beta version of that vendor's OS tries to convert "distros" into "distress").

This is getting slightly off topic, but it is interesting how FreeBSD code finds it's way into so many other systems, but not too surprising when you consider the fairly widespread opinion of it's high code quality and statistically proven fewest bugs per lines. Darwin has already been mentioned and probably has the closest resemblance. You can also include the AT&T UNIX systems and their many derivatives which have all pulled code from the BSDs into their source tree's at various points, important to n

O_o strange, thanks for pointing it out. I was repeating what i read from Wikipedia on the BSD page a long time ago, but it appears to still be there: BSD [wikipedia.org]

[...]These, in turn, have been incorporated in whole or in part in modern proprietary operating systems, e.g. the TCP/IP (IPv4 only) networking code in Microsoft Windows and a part of the foundation of Apple's OS X.

Where does this myth come from then, and how did it end up being passed of as fact on wikipedia? perhaps you could correct it for us being as you know the whys and hows. I'm being sincere, no sarcasm here:)

Since the late 90s there have been mumblings ("Someone I know who works at MS said they knew someone who said...") that code from BSD TCP/IP stack was in Windows but there was never any proof. Some speculated that because they were susceptible to some of the same vulnerabilities they must share common code but there were some vulnerabilities that affected the Windows TCP/IP stack not the BSD one (and vice versa) so this seems unlikely.

You might want to scan the Android stack for FreeBSD copyrights sometime. Most of the Android libc is a slimmed-down version of the FreeBSD one, and there are quite a few other bits of FreeBSD code in there too. In terms of lines of code, I think there is about as much FreeBSD code in Android as there is Linux code.

This is one of the weird and crap things about andriod. They seem to be on a perverse "anti bloat" crusade and focussing that on all the least bloated components of their system: libc, gcc and the kernel. All the while leaving the substantially bloatier main bit of android.

This is one of the reasons android seems persistently a bit crap really. They remove useful features from the slim underlying system "because of bloat" and pile the crap int

I never understood this either. For example, they ripped all of the locale support out of libc to remove bloat. Which then means that everyone who uses the NDK reimplements it in another library, which is not shared...

there are noteworthy features in this particular case. BSD being more stable and mature generally have something cool to show for new point releases. Linux kernel point releases, on the other hand.... every random brain fart by Linus gets an article

Yeah sorry if it isn't marketing or patent news on smartphones or tablets then it just doesn't appeal to slashdot's current audience. If you cant have a flame war about how Samsung copied Apple and how Microsoft is evil and controlling (oh but also obsolete) then it isn't news.

Thanks. The less noobs like yourself that use it, the less of a target the OS will be. I've been happily running internet facing stuff on FreeBSD since 2001, and it's been a pleasant change from the chaos that is Linux development and distribution upgrade.

Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not relying entirely on security via obscurity. But if the OS is not the most common mainstream noob-used OS, then it is going to see less effort put towards hacking it. All my shit is still firewalled and doesn't even listen to any remote admin port via the internet.

I'm not relying entirely on security via obscurity. But if the OS is not the most common mainstream noob-used OS, then it is going to see less effort put towards hacking it.

That's called "security via obscurity". Such properties will only protect you against the basic automated scan, but then so will simply using good security practices, and if you're using good security practices, there's no point even mentioning the modicum of protection offered by using an uncommon OS.

... and that's the very definition of security through obscurity. If it's well secured, then it's well secured and it doesn't matter what it is. Either way, you're only going to be vulnerable to a targeted attack by someone who actually knows what they're doing. Using a "niche os" only matters against cursory scans trawling the internet for systems with poor passwords or known (and long-since-patched) bugs, and a "well secured niche os" wouldn't worry about such things anyway.

You can be secure against every known vulnerability. If someone goes to the trouble to find a zero day and write an exploit for it to compromise the largest number of machines possible, it's better to not be running the most common platform. End of story.

Encryption is by definition security through obscurity. As is using hashing and other fingerprinting techniques. The obscure nature of the encryption key or input to the has is exactly what makes it all work.

When you repeat that same retarded phrase like its a bad thing all you're doing showing those of us with an actual clue that you're capable of repeating what you heard someone else stay but you utterly fail to understand

That's not at all what is meant when one refers to obscurity. Security through obscurity is the claim that a black box is inherently more secure than one in which you know the inner workings, or in this case, it's the claim that a black box you've never seen before is inherently more secure than one which you have had time to analyze. All it's going to do is make you a less appetizing target for an attacker looking for anyone to compromise. It makes no difference to your vulnerability when an attacker wa

Sorry to break it to you, but there's a Mach kernel working inside your system, not a FreeBSD kernel as many idiots like to believe. There's a bit of FreeBSD userland around, indeed, but it's nowhere near what Apple allows you to use. You don't use 'BSD, the Mac version', you use an Apple-Windows user interface on top of things you neither know, nor understand.

Sorry to break it to you, but there's a Mach kernel working inside your system, not a FreeBSD kernel as many idiots like to believe.

More precisely, there's a kernel composed of Mach-derived code [apple.com] (providing the low-level process and thread management, Mach messaging [apple.com], VM system [apple.com], and some low-level platform [apple.com] support [apple.com]), BSD-derived code [apple.com] (providing the high-level process management atop the Mach low-level code, VFS layer and some file systems that plug into it, and networking layer and networking stacks), and Apple-developed code in various places including I/O Kit. The Unix system call interface is provided by the BSD-derived code.

Ah, thanks for that. Without a gratuitous ad distronem attack within the first page of comments, I wouldn't be sure I was reading something about BSD.

As for de Raadt's "unsupportable fuckwittery", the infallably polite are soon back-doored and sent to PRISM. The Philistines didn't send Goliath down to challenge the Israelites in single combat because he was the life of the party. His rawhide posse seems to get a lot done, despite the incessant hail of small stones. If only they'd sent Theo instead. Thi

FreeBSD is very well documented (The manual is awesome) and it has a great community. There are a lot of good discussions on the mailing list, and it doesn't require you to be a kernel hacker to participate. I use both Linux and FreeBSD, they both have their strength and weaknesses. I slightly prefer FreeBSD, as I feel its easier to turn it inside out(for hacking).

Btw. Poul-Henning Kamp tweeted this a few days ago.Between FreeBSD, Varnish and Ngnix, at least 2 out of 3 packets on the net are delivered by #B

If one is coming from a Windows background, a good place to start should be PC-BSD. Their installation has been simplified, and it comes OOTB with KDE, which one can make to look like Windows. Only thing I don't know about here - whether things like Network configuration and other configuration can be done from a control panel, or whether one needs to invoke a terminal and start editing/etc/ files.

Speaking of which, if 9.2 is out for FBSD, is that also the case for PC-BSD? Also, does PC-BSD have as ma